[53330] in Cypherpunks
Re: Spinners and compression functions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Sat Apr 6 11:41:45 1996
To: JonWienke@aol.com
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 05 Apr 1996 21:07:16 EST."
<960405210713_185610686@emout10.mail.aol.com>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Sat, 06 Apr 1996 11:26:03 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
JonWienke@aol.com writes:
> Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various
> things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet
> another idea. Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression
> function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that. This would provide
> a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG,
> (count the bytes output from the compression function)
Actually, it doesn't. The entropy present from a reasonable source
like keyclick timings is much much lower than the output of pkzip is
going to suggest to you.
Perry
